… and David Farenholdt, at the Washington Post, deserves at least one Pulitzer. I’ve been working on a post about his findings for the last couple of weeks, but he keeps churning out new information. None of which the cable-news Media Village Idiots have deigned to discuss — until now.

… The Donald J. Trump Foundation is not like other charities. An investigation of the foundation — including examinations of 17 years of tax filings and interviews with more than 200 individuals or groups listed as donors or beneficiaries — found that it collects and spends money in a very unusual manner.

For one thing, nearly all of its money comes from people other than Trump. In tax records, the last gift from Trump was in 2008. Since then, all of the donations have been other people’s money — an arrangement that experts say is almost unheard of for a family foundation.

Trump then takes that money and generally does with it as he pleases. In many cases, he passes it on to other charities, which often are under the impression that it is Trump’s own money.

In two cases, he has used money from his charity to buy himself a gift. In one of those cases — not previously reported — Trump spent $20,000 of money earmarked for charitable purposes to buy a six-foot-tall painting of himself.

Money from the Trump Foundation has also been used for political purposes, which is against the law. The Washington Post reported this month that Trump paid a penalty this year to the Internal Revenue Service for a 2013 donation in which the foundation gave $25,000 to a campaign group affiliated with Florida Attorney General Pamela Bondi (R).

Trump’s foundation appears to have repeatedly broken IRS rules, which require nonprofit groups to file accurate paperwork. In five cases, the Trump Foundation told the IRS that it had given a gift to a charity whose leaders told The Post that they had never received it. In two other cases, companies listed as donors to the Trump Foundation told The Post that those listings were incorrect….

This guy is Max Bialystock without the charm. He’s the guy from ‘around the office’ who shows up just as your group is planning lunch, demands a slightly pricier (but not as good) restaurant than anyone else, makes a point of do-you-know-who-I-am-ing the host, abuses the waitstaff, spends the entire meal loudly bragging about his exploits when he’s not shoveling the most overpriced entree into his face, disappears into the mens room just as the check shows up, and only emerges to see if he can palm the tip once the rest of you leave. And he’s the Republican candidate for president — so, presumably, that’s what they like in a leader!

It’s infuriating. The only possible silver lining is that all the women who have been passed over for promotions by no-nothing males and who have had to deal with all sorts of indignities on the job, will get revenge at the ballot box.

The beltway media is basically treating a guarded politician in Clinton as basically the same as a true blue con man like Donald Trump.

Is there a journalistic version of a closed door players only meeting? Where they hash things out and try to get their shit together for the closing stretch of the season? The press sure as hell need one right now

Make sure to click through to the actual WaPo article – it’s not much, but it IS an incentive for WaPo to actually continue producing good work like this.

But seriously, this latest thing about the Police Foundation is pretty nuts. He takes someone else’s money for the police, passes it off as his own, gets an awards ceremony honoring himself and then charges for the use of his ball room, profiting on the deal.

” When do you think they’ll get around to covering Donald Trump’s obvious issues? ”

Not until they are forced to, out of embarrassment. Many of these issues were know during the GOP primary, and too much trouble to report them then. So much for intrepid press’ roll in brutally vetting candidates for high office, unless a Democrat.

He encouraged the audience to fight in every possibly way so that they aren’t forced “to do it physically.” However, he argues that it may come to the shedding of blood.

“I will tell you this: I do think it would be possible, but at what price?” he said, after being asked if he thought America would survive Clinton. “At what price? The roots of the tree of liberty are watered by what? The blood, of who? The tyrants to be sure, but who else? The patriots.”

If WaPo smells blood in the water from the carcass of NYT’s reputation they’ll hopefully keep doubling down on Trump’s thundering un-qualification to be president and legal hanky-panky. It’s not as though WSJ will step into the breech.

@MomSense:
I guarantee you there is nothing Matt Bevin ‘knows better than’. However, while Kentuckians will drink up that message like ice water in a desert, they’re too ignorant and disorganized and paranoid to do anything about it.

@Waldo: It occurred to me that Trump’s supporters aren’t surprised by disclosures about his charity. Not that they had inside info, but that they know quite well the kind of man he is. The problem for the country is that they like it.

@Kay:
‘Eyeballs and ratings’ has never been enough as an argument. Yes, it’s important to the press, but they have any number of Ratings Gold if-it-bleeds-it-leads stories, and could choose much sexier ones than the constant harping on Hillary’s dishonesty. Hell, Trump is a nonstop circus parade they could ride all the way to November. They don’t like Trump, but they hate Hillary, and enjoy needling her every chance they get.

It doesn’t help that they feel really uncomfortable talking about racism, and so many of Trump’s stories involve that.

It’s so infuriating. We have a background check referendum question on the ballot which is causing all sorts of paranoid machinations. Of course our ignoranus governor didn’t help things with his racist rantings.

@MomSense:
It is, but large dinosaurs took millions of years to die out. This is the flailing of a dying white racist majority, but they have decades to go before they’re a clear minority. I think they’ll keep getting crazier, and I hope the merely mildly racist will be unable to make common cause with them, thus leaving Democrats victors by default long before the demographic timer gets us there.

@Tilda Swinton’s Bald Cap:
Mostly, he just needs to not be governor, but he is what Kentucky wanted, like Trump is what the GOP wanted. I feel bad for the many, many innocents caught in that explosion of hate.

The problem with this revelation is that most of Donald Trump’s voters call themselves Christians primarily for the tax breaks. They aren’t going to be put off by a guy ripping off charities, because in their eyes that’s what charities are for.

Heck, this may even be the point which gets Paul Ryan to finally endorse him. Ryan once snuck into a soup kitchen when no one was looking to get pictures taken of himself pretending to clean dirty dishes. If anything, he admires Trump’s style here.

Kentucky is the state where white people who depended on ObamaCare voted to eliminate ObamaCare because the Near Sheriffs were also getting ObamaCare. IOW, a state chock-a-block with ignorant racist politically active hicks who run the place and a passive majority who cannot be bothered, voter turnout in 2015 was 30.7%.

Fahrenthold is making all the other journalists look terrible. He is doing the real reporting you almost never see any more. I love that he tweets out pictures of handwritten (quelle horror!) pages from the legal pads he is keeping track of his work on. The charities he’s contacted are listed and marked in different colors for Never, No Comment, and I assume for actual donations if he ever finds any. He’s contacted 326 charities so far.

@Mary G: Farenthold is wonderful! He’s not depending on access or quotes someone gives him. He’s out doing research. As you say, he’s doing the kind of reporting you don’t see much.

As I watch the Trump faction, and listen to “Hamilton,” it occurs to me that the Founding Fathers were incredibly bold to trust democracy. They must have known there’d be whatever their generation of Trumpian types was, but they trusted (or maybe just hoped) that the more rational types would outnumber them. Of course, they didn’t trust everyone to vote. They restricted the franchise. Still, it was brave.

The problem with this revelation is that most of Donald Trump’s voters call themselves Christians primarily for the tax breaks.

I don’t think that’s fair. They call themselves Christians because they believe the same things that other people who call themselves Christians believe. You just have to remember that one of the major Christian denominations in the US was founded primarily to use the Bible to justify slavery, and you can understand how people with all kinds of beliefs can call themselves Christian.

I tend to agree with you, but I’m just trying to get the troll to admit that Trump voters are not, in fact, good-hearted Americans who are fed up with the major parties and don’t realize that Trump is a white supremacist. I’m sorry, but that’s bullshit. They know, and that’s why they’re voting for him.

I don’t think they will. NYC is a media center. He operated there for 30 years running scam after scam apparently with complete impunity. Also- no one knew he was a racist? He’s 70 years old and he’s been operating in one of the world’s media centers for 40 years and they just discovered Donald Trump is a racist? Seems improbable.

@Frankensteinbeck: Yep. What’s spectacularly weird is that one of them is even married to someone from the Dominican Republic, but can’t see what Trump is saying and implying about her.

But I think that’s basically where we’re at. There’s a huge subset of essentially racist people who don’t want to believe that they’re racist, so they just define their behavior as “not racist” and move merrily along their way.

So much for “our racism problems are centered in the southern states” huh? There one was, right on their front pages, year after year. No one knew. I don’t know how not- he never shuts up. I knew after the first birther appearance.

NPR interviewed Fahrenthold this afternoon. My favorite part was Trump solicited a deceased friend’s family foundation for the Palm Beach FL police department and then donated it to the department in the name of his own foundation.

Unfortunately, the foundation wasn’t upset because they supported the police department, but they’ve since contributed directly. I guess the rich expect other rich to scam them.

@Kay: @Iowa Old Lady: He is so creative. He’s gotten readers to call in with names of charities to check, and today he put up a series of tweets of hideous giant paintings of Trump that Trump owns, and asking readers to find out where the one he bought for $20K with foundation money is, as none of these are it, and also the football helmet he bought with foundation money for $12K.

The only problem, as Kay says, is that every other news organization in America seems to want to interview Fahrenthold rather than do some actual reporting of their own. He won’t have time to dig up more stuff!

As I watch the Trump faction, and listen to “Hamilton,” it occurs to me that the Founding Fathers were incredibly bold to trust democracy.

They were actually pretty distrustful of democracy. They not only wanted to restrict the franchise, as you mentioned, but they also used a lot of indirect democracy- Senators elected by state legislatures, the electoral college, etc.- to avoid leaving too much in the hands of the masses. And they didn’t have that much confidence that they’d be successful over the long term. They called the government they created an experiment and expected failure.

@Kay: My childhood was split between Queens and rural Alabama in the 60s/70s. Trust me, my family knew there was plenty of trouble in both places.

As for lack of exposure for the Donald, our media is just as much a problem for Sentient America as the GOP is. They don’t seem to realize that under most fascists, the press gets an early shot at getting shot. Indeed they would “find the having not nearly so pleasing as the wanting.”

One of my colleagues suggested to me that there wasn’t any evidence that Trump ever had done anything racist. When I mentioned that Trump had been involved in refusing to rent to blacks, there was a pause in the conversation.

I was arguing on reddit and I got some links for some youtube video of trump supporters being attacked. The website is right wing, but the images makes me angry that we treat people like this even if they are on other side. here

The website is vidmax It’s kind of sad from the comments to see people enjoying seeing trump supporters getting beaten up. ;(

I have developed some sympathy for John Adams and the Alien & Sedition Acts, because they were passed in response to the French Revolution taking its bloody turn into the Reign of Terror and they felt there was a reasonable chance that the US could similarly devolve into chaos and mob terror.

I can’t reliably see YouTube on my phone, but was that from the Sacramento riot? That got really weird because it was asshole Black Block anarchists vs Trump supporters. No good guys to root for there.

All I want at this point is a truth and reconciliation committee after the election just so that we have a thorough examination of all of the grifting, scamming, lying, racism, and oh did I mention grifting? that has been going on for over a year now by this moron and his supporters. Call it Sunlight Squared – let’s just help the media absolving itself of its guilt for this nonsense by letting them take four long years to recap this sort of scumbaggery.

Bevin was a typical business grift attendee of a megachurch in the east end of Louisville. As the climate has changed so much here as to religion (smaller Protestant and fundamentalist churches have closed down as the youth mainly drifted off, leaving a rump that drifted into three different mega churches), the business grift class found its way there. Bevin was one of those.

One old friend and one asshole fuckhead high school classmate were very instrumental in this campaign.

@Frankensteinbeck: Butt…but if they actually talked about racism, that would mean honest discussions and thinking and introspection. Can’t have that. Better to keep judging others, or even better, PREJUDGE them.

The reason the elite news media doesn’t hammer Trump as hard as they should is simply timidity. No major news outlet wants to deviate from what the accepted opinion of the day’s news is, so none does. (Staffing cutbacks and greatly reduced resources are contributing factors, but these tendencies were present back when newspapers were still profitable concerns.) Here’s an example: About 20 years ago, after the first Iraq adventure, I was working on the copy desk of a major metro daily, and we were running a story from the Los Angeles Times syndicate about how the U.S. had larded Saddam Hussein’s government with oodles of aid money not long before our invasion. It came across my computer terminal, and I approached the assistant foreign news editor (the line editor for that evening) and told him this was the best story in the paper and it needed to be on page 1. Now here’s the deal: the Los Angeles Times (at least back then) was a pretty good newspaper, but it wasn’t The New York Times or The Washington Post, so giving prominent display to its reporting would be a significant deviation from the accepted opinion. So he hemmed and hawed — he didn’t want to be seen as rocking the boat — and decided to leave it as it was, running about 20 inches with a strip-42-point headline on about page 15A.

Six months later, The New York Times came up with its version of the story. Different details, to be sure, but essentially the same story. And my paper ran it as the lead story on 1A. The assistant foreign editor at least sheepishly acknowledged that my initial news judgment had been spot-on.

@Iowa Old Lady: Disturbing conclusion, but more and more it seems like the simplest explanation. Months ago, i wanted to believe too many voters were just too stupid to accept what is obvious – and repetitive, in some syntaxes. The alternative – that they favor evil behavior that is condemned by their alleged religions – is much harder to deny.

Whoah there people. let’s give Deadbeat Donald a little slack. i am sure, based on a careful review of his history, he is the type of donor who believes it is better to give anonymously than to get all that fame and glory.

@opiejeanne: As a woman of color, I find the comment to be both depressing and offensive. This reporter’s comment indicates that the media is pushing for the election of Trump. The media’s reaction to the deplorable comment is both eye-opening and infuriating. Nevertheless, we need to GOTV so that we can crush the GOP.

Amanda Marcotte ‏@AmandaMarcotte Sep 11
Amanda Marcotte Retweeted S.I. Rosenbaum
This. It took months to get male journalists to accept that they harass women because harassing women is the point.

S.I. Rosenbaum ‏@sirosenbaum
This argument about the nature of Trump supporters is really “it’s about ethics in games journalism” writ large
We went thru this w/G*m*rg*t*: whatever your interests may be, if you get in the car with racists & abusers, you’re in the racist abuser car
“Oh, some people in the car are jerks, but for me it’s really about ethics,” you say as the car careens over a cliff

David Rudin @DavidSRudin
@sirosenbaum From my perch in videogame news this has all felt scarily inevitable: GG figured out the perfect playbook for playing the media

This is one reason why I was never quite comfortable with the “everybody’s kinda racist” attitude. That lets the huge honkin’ get-off-on-being-racist racists off the hook, as if taking slightly longer to recognize black faces than white faces were pretty much the same thing.

@burnspbesq: There was a recent interview with Bob Woodward where he said that Bezos was telling the newsroom that, for both candidates, he didn’t want there to be anything that, after the election, they regretted the public not knowing. That is a great attitude. Way too much I’m so inside, if only you could know what I know BS going on.

They are obviously doing their very best to be stone cold racists while using their understanding of the media to protect their racist hearts from any disclosure. While being nearly as obvious about their racism as George Wallace was, or Lester… what’s his name?

Was Gov. of Georgia, ran a restaurant, Lester Maddox, that’s it. Ax handles he passed out to use of black people who might have by accident wandered into his hot grease food joint. Trump would have contributed to Bull Conners’ pension fund if asked. That’s the chief of police in Selma that thought up using barbed wire to wrap their clubs with, to beat Martin Luther King and his marchers. And set dogs on them.

Don’t forget, lots of people died in the civil rights movement back then. It is obvious that racists still lust to kill for their white supremacy, they talk about it all the time. The Kentucky Governor did it just the other day, or was that today? That blood he was talking about? It isn’t his, it is ours~!!!

@Taylor: Fred Hiatt is the editor of the editorial page. Marty Baron, who was editor of the Boston Globe while it uncovered the pedophile priest scandals, is now the editor of The Washington Post. I assume Hiatt answers to him, but I am not aware of all newsroom traditions.

@Frankensteinbeck: The dynamic is different with regard to local stories, because the dominant newspaper in a market can still largely determine what the accepted opinion is. But The New York Times, The Washington Post, and, to a much lesser extent, The Wall Street Journal, as well as the cable and TV networks, determine that opinion for national and international stories. The Chicago Tribune, for instance (and I’ve never worked there) is a major newspaper with a large circulation, but it doesn’t set the tone for the coverage of any story outside the Chicagoland area.

@J R in WV: And I thought Randy Newman immortalized old Lester in his song “Rednecks.”

This is one reason why I was never quite comfortable with the “everybody’s kinda racist” attitude. That lets the huge honkin’ get-off-on-being-racist racists off the hook, as if taking slightly longer to recognize black faces than white faces were pretty much the same thing.

IIRC, it was supposed to be a two-parter: everyone’s a little bit racist, so therefore everyone needs to take a look at themselves and make sure they’re not acting in a racist way towards others. Being lazy-ass Americans, most people just heard it as an excuse and didn’t bother with the action plan.

@Mnemosyne: And there are few Americans more lazy-ass than the vermin of the Village. The reaction to Farenholdt’s actual journalism, where they talk to him about the story instead of doing any of the work themselves, because, hey, we’ve got access to protect, tells you all about them.